On More General Distributions of Random Binning for Slepian-Wolf Encoding

TL;DR

This paper explores generalized random binning distributions for Slepian-Wolf encoding, analyzing their impact on error and source coding exponents, and demonstrates that broader ensembles can outperform traditional variable-rate schemes in certain scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a wider class of random binning distributions for Slepian-Wolf coding, showing they can outperform traditional schemes and offer robustness against system failures.

Findings

Wider ensembles match VRSW in error and source coding trade-offs.

Wider ensembles outperform VRSW in pathological cases.

Proposed ensembles enable robust reconstruction despite system failures.

Abstract

Traditionally, ensembles of Slepian-Wolf (SW) codes are defined such that every bin of each $n$-vector of each source is randomly drawn under the uniform distribution across the sets $\{0,1,\ldots,2^{nR_X}-1\}$ and $\{0,1,\ldots,2^{nR_Y}-1\}$, where $R_X$ and $R_Y$ are the coding rates of the two sources, $X$ and $Y$, respectively. In a few more recent works, where only one source, say, $X$, is compressed and the other one, $Y$, serves as side information available at the decoder, the scope is extended to variable-rate S-W (VRSW) codes, where the rate is allowed to depend on the type class of the source string, but still, the random-binning distribution is assumed uniform within the corresponding, type-dependent, bin index set. In this expository work, we investigate the role of the uniformity of the random binning distribution from the perspective of the trade-off between the reliability (defined in terms of the error exponent) and the compression performance (measured from the viewpoint of the source coding exponent). To this end, we study a much wider class of random-binning distributions, which includes the ensemble of VRSW codes as a special case, but it also goes considerably beyond. We first show that, with the exception of some pathological cases, the smaller ensemble, of VRSW codes, is as good as the larger ensemble in terms the trade-off between the error exponent and the source coding exponent. Notwithstanding this finding, the wider class of ensembles proposed is motivated in two ways. The first is that it outperforms VRSW codes in the above-mentioned pathological cases, and the second is that it allows robustness: in the event of a system failure that causes unavailability of the compressed bit-stream from one of the sources, it still allows reconstruction of the other source within some controllable distortion.